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Google seems to have problems hanging on to top design talent; Doug Bowman's post on leaving Google, and on the culture at the company, was rather revealing for me on that point.

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I think you misunderstood my point. Matias Duarte is "famed" UI guy that just left Palm/HP's WebOS team for Google's Android team.

I'm not sure about Google's ability to retain talent... but I'm hopeful that Matias can bring Android some UI/UX love.

And I think you misunderstood my point: it seems likely that Google simply does not value design talent all that much, and thus that the way to improve Android UI is not simply to hire talented designers, but rather to completely change that aspect of Google's corporate culture.

OK, what did I do? When Doug Bowman left Google he wrote a rather revealing critique of their attitude toward design, and the general disregard for it in their corporate culture:

http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

Given that, is it really all that unreasonable to point out that Google's UI problems probably are not going to be solved by one person, no matter how much the general community likes him (after all, Bowman's pretty well-loved in the design community, and look what happened to him)?

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